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Topic: Storage Server Rebuild (Read 6885 times)

I built my first flexRaid system approximately 1 year ago. Running on Windows Storage Server 2008. The Box was a lowly Core 2 Duo with 4GB of Ram. 1TB boot drive and 5 1TB drives for Raid + Pooling. The system has over the year grown to additionally include 14 2TB drives in E-Sata enclosures. This system has now run it's course and no longer meets my needs. The old hardware was also not entirely rack friendly.Old CaseE-Sata EnclosuresServer and Enclosures in rack

I recently retired an MS Exchange server I was hosting for a client and have decided to re-use the hardware as the basis for a storage box.Recovered Hardware Specs:Norco RPC-450BAsus P5BV-C/4LIntel Xeon X32208GB ECC Memory

I wanted all drive bays in the new build to be hot-swap to facilitate drive replacement without requiring a system shutdown.I recovered the SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1B 5 bay hot-swap enclosure from the old storage serverAdditionally I added 2 Norco SS-500 5 bay enclosures to the case

To control all these drives I added an IBM ServeRAID M1015 and a CHENBRO 28 Port SAS Expander CardThankfully I have lots of left over SFF-8087 to sata and SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cables from customer builds so I didn't need to buy any of those.

The new server will have Server 2012 Standard as the OS2 new 1TB WD Red drives in Raid 1 for the OS2 new 3TB WD Red drives as the PPU drives replacing the old 1TB drives16 original 2TB drives from the old server mixture of WD Green and Seagate Green/LP drives3 new 2TB WD Red drives 2 2TB Samsung drives I had laying aboutThis will leave me 6 open drive bays for expansion before I have to start replacing 2TB drives with 3 or 4 TB drivesI will have 40-42 TB of storage depending on how you do your drive math. Which will give me 10TB more space than before as I was down to only 4TB free that should give me a bit of time to grow.

Unfortunately the SGI enclosure has front mounted SFF-8088 ports so I would have needed a rather long cable to reach to the Chenbro card on the back of the case. Additionally since the enclosure has a built in expander I didn't want to add any overhead by running the disk through a second expander and pass it through the Chenbro card. So I picked up a Koutech IO-SFF881 SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 converter.

Since the RPC-450 obviously doesn't have a SCSI expansion interface port on the front to mount that card to and the door on the front of the case covers it completely some surgery was required.

All put together and ready for testing. Each drive bay is labelled with the corresponding number from MegaRaid Storage Manager for easy indentification laterAll closed up the SFF-8088 cable is kinda long but necessary so that the server can be slid out on it's rails